Josh Mack blogging at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts, and occasionally on; bicycles, politics, Brooklyn, parenting, crafts, and good reading. Currently helping to build a new NYC neighborhood news site - nearsay.com, that celebrates the voices that make our city. Subscribe to the daily newsletter it gives you what you need to know.

And what do we learn by this deep insight into Tiki? Possibly, that waiting around between practice and sessions with the trainer is a lot like waiting at an airport and perfect for mass market paperbacks, that he likes to eat well when on the road, that he has a spiritual side, and that his aforementioned business acumen may one day grace us with food that will enable us all to have as blinding a smile as he has. I for one can't wait to see which locker library Anderson delves into next? What's Nate Robinson reading during his suspension?

"Which means it is perfect time for a new blog devoted to what Jeff Jarvis describes as "exploding TV. " Title of some spam I received this morning. This of course was followed by a bunch of gibberish and a photo of a hot stock.

The NYT highlights two new social network venture this morning, Saatchi's Stuart for artists, and the Showtime's OurChart.com an soc. net for Lesbians as an offshoot of the L Word. The Saatchi site is interesting as it combines a really well known gallery and program with the ability for artists to post their work and try to gain interest as well as the possible opportunity to show their work in the gallery itself. Like Takkle's partnership with SI, Netflix's growing movie fan network, and Adaptive Path's new linkedin like site for Hoover's the combination of social networking with existing brands and predefined common interests is the next thing.

Ourchart doesn't launch until January so there is nothing to see. One thing I discovered in looking for it, is that the L word fan sites are a lot more impressive the the show's official site.

December 12, 2006

Takkle and SI teaming up. It's going to be interesting to see how the fact that a major media company and a site that prompts it 13-18 year old audience deal with privacy issues and web predators. The profile of Kelsey Henshaw , one of their featured athletes, on Takkle's homepage contains a lot of detail about her; favorites, her schedule, her equipment, height and weight, school, hometown, in addition I can see her schedule of games etc. It is true that kids put up this info and more on myspace but in this case a lot of it is prompted by the system, on Facebook (it used to be) behind a wall. Takkle looks like a nicely done site with some innovative ideas for lists, but the whole issue of how to stage it and deal with the display is worthy of a much longer post. In the meantime I wonder how quickly this will become an issue, if at all, for Time Inc. Do any of you think there is an issue?

A new survey conducted by the advertising firm Spier New York found
that 18% of readers have been to a publisher's Web site, while 23% of
readers polled have visited an author's site. The survey, based on a
sample of 813 readers, did not ask if readers bought a book from either
site. Not surprisingly, the younger the reader, the more likely that
person visited the Web. The survey found that 35% of readers under age
35 had visited an author's Web site and 21% of respondents in that age
bracket had been to a publisher's site.

December 11, 2006

I've been so busy telling co-workers, and other people I know who need to know, about seriouseats, that I've forgotten to blog about it. The site which launched last week is a wonderful example of the kind of instant category contender that can happen when you take some well known journalists and great food bloggers, awesome technologists, and mix in a lot of enthusiasm. The site is all MT with various extensions such as tags, it has forums, a video player powered by the wonderful Brightcove player, a reblog, and other great features. I've e-mailed about it quite a lot in the past few days and am a bit pooped so rather than list the players etc. Just go to the site and poke around.

So Nerve is moving into the crowded parenting space with babble. Say what you will about its chances of success but I think it is a helluva URL. The press release, and the NYT Style section article on it.